Month: April 2020

YouTube reportedly working on TikTok competitor called Shorts

YouTube used to be the cool kid on the block, but then TikTok showed up and everything changed. Now, YouTube is looking to compete directly with the short-form, user-generated content app by reportedly launching its own version called “Shorts.” Shorts will allow people to upload brief videos into a feed…

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Hey Robot, the genius game that tests your smart speaker, is now free on the web

Hey Robot, the immensely clever board game from designer Frank Lantz’s Everybody House Games, now has a free digital version on the web for anyone to play. Lantz says he and his collaborators, which include his wife Hilary and his son and daughter-in-law, threw together a “quick & dirty online…

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Spotify and Warner agree to an ‘expanded’ global licensing deal

Today, Spotify and Warner Music Group announced in a short statement that the two entities have renewed their global licensing agreement. This news comes about two months after Spotify ended its “global food fight” with Warner / Chappell Music (Warner Music Group’s publishing arm), and the two entities inked a…

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An EU coalition of techies is backing a “privacy-preserving” standard for COVID-19 contacts tracing

A European coalition of techies and scientists drawn from at least eight countries, and led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI), is working on contacts-tracing proximity technology for COVID-19 that’s designed to comply with the region’s strict privacy rules — officially unveiling the effort today. China-style individual-level…

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NASA issues agency-wide crowdsourcing call for ideas around COVID-19 response

There’s crowdsourcing a problem, and then there’s crowdsourcing a problem within NASA, where some of the smartest, most creative and resourceful problem-solvers in the world solve real-world challenges daily as part of their job. That’s why it’s uplifting to hear that NASA has issued a call to its entire workforce…

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LinkedIn’s making its recruitment tools free to those fighting the coronavirus pandemic

Like many other websites at the moment, the career-oriented networking platform LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic as a result of people being asked to work from home and stay indoors overall to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with a bump of 55% more conversational activity between…

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